TRAVELING CRITIC : The Big Apple's Van Cortlandt Park Golf Club

Bronx cheer

If any place qualifies as the Metropolitan Museum of Golf, it's Van Cortlandt Park Golf Club in the Bronx borough of New York City. It's the oldest public golf course in America, the first to have set tee times and one of the first with course rangers.

It started as nine holes in 1895, became a full 18 in 1899, then got hacked up by the 1937 construction of two major highways. The present layout looks as if it were designed by a legislative redistricting committee--six holes here, another four past Mosholu Parkway, four more over an old railway line and the last four on steep hills overlooking the Major Deegan Expressway. Van Cortlandt measures just 6,102 yards, par 70, but to walk the course adds another 1,800 yards. From the clubhouse to the first tee is 750 yards. It's a shorter walk from the clubhouse to the closest subway station (two lines stop here). Not surprisingly, a cart costs more than the green fee. Van Cortlandt is quintessential Big Apple golf: tees and trash, greens and graffiti, trees and traffic noise, the holes populated by a delightful shag bag of nationalities and golf swings.

The course now has a decent irrigation system and new bunkers and greens created by a true New Yorker, architect Stephen Kay. The clubhouse, which dates from 1902, has a spiffy golf shop, but the upstairs locker room (small photo) looks much shabbier than when Gordon Gekko (actor Michael Douglas) changed clothes there in the 1987 film "Wall Street." This museum wing is in need of some polish.

Getting on: $21 -$30.
Phone 718-543-4595.

www.americangolf.com

COPYRIGHT 2002 Golf Digest Companies
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning